Everybody's raving about Crow Country, the new old-school survival horror title set in a defunct amusement park with N64 visuals and FF7-style environments. Nitro Rad loves it! Pat and Woolie love it! Vinny Caravella...well, he said on the Nextlander podcast that he didn't play much of it, as is the general Nextlander habit nowadays, but he made vague noises of approval toward it and indies in general!
So everyone loves it! Except me. But I guess the title kind of spoiled that. Hello. I am the one person in creation who doesn't adore Crow Country.
I was originally going to title this post with part of supergreatfriend's rant (Zero Escape spoilers in link) about the big twist in Zero Time Dilemma upon its revelation ("That is by far the dumbest thing that's been in any of these games! That's dumber than a David Cage plot twist!"). This is an extremely stupid plot. Like, levels of stupid previously plumbed only by Axe Cop, the comic written by a literal five-year-old - and not by design or with self-awareness, as it is in that book. Crow Country also falls down in tension, combat, and environmental design in a functional gameplay (though not aesthetic) sense. After the credits rolled, I found myself asking if it were better than Clock Tower: The Struggle Within and concluding that it was really kind of a draw.
Two things happened after that point to soften my opinion, however. One: After beating the game, the results screen told me I had unlocked for New Game+ this seemingly-nifty quest to find a bunch of crystal crows hidden throughout the environment. Though my reservations about Crow Country were numerous, I did enjoy the FF7-style cluttered, character-filled environmental design, and the game is by no means long. So after beating Crow Country and holding my head, I took the only course of action evident to someone who's spent dozens of hours of her life retranslating Phantasy Star III: I went back immediately and beat the game again.
The second is that I learned that Crow Country was made largely by one guy:
Now, I thought the game did not succeed in most of the elements for which I play survival horror. But it is an accomplishment to pull off and put out there a project on which you've toiled for years and have brought into existence just by your own sheer, dogged, long-unrewarded persistence (some with which I sympathize keenly at the moment). And for all the accusations I, the lonely detractor, would level at Crow Country, I do think the game succeeds very well in a few areas. It is also - like Final Fantasy VI, another critical & popular darling about which I have severe reservations - a game that is getting me through some tough times, and after completing it twice (and coming off the high point of the reward for the crystal crow quest), I now have a certain attachment to it, despite standing by my criticisms.
So let me start by enumerating the major things I like about Crow Country:
- It looks like a very nice imitation of an N64 game and the platform's distinctive candy-colored Playskool minimally-textured polygons, dressed up with FF7's cluttered, lived-in approach to environmental design. If you have a particular affection or personal attachment to the N64, you'll probably get a lot more out of this title than I did (being from the NES/SNES heyday) just from the visuals alone.
- Crow Country also does a really smart thing for an old-school Resident Evil-style horror game: it hides items in the set dressing, rewarding the player for looking over the scenery with a keen eye. The FF7 environments aren't just a visual style or source of nostalgia: they're leveraged to gameplay effect.
- It has a neat and smart trick that I haven't seen in similar survival horror games, where you can rotate the camera to see the environment from different angles, which it uses to smart effect for a few puzzles.
- In fact, the puzzles, with one exception, are generally good in this game. They're not overly tough, but they frequently use neat new tricks that are intuitive or decently tricky but just haven't been used in survival horror before. There's even an "I have the same combination on my luggage!" non-puzzle door lock, and someone grouses in a note about it being a security concern.
- A defunct theme park is a unique and visually-interesting setting for a survival horror game. A few titles have offered up theme park levels, but using the park as the entire setting, using various attractions as levels, offers a lot of variety.
- There are a number of quality-of-life features the dev added to the traditional tank-control survival horror format that genuinely do improve your experience. Environmental kill mechanisms for enemies are generous. Signficant information about item use and puzzle-solving is signposted well in documents and item descriptions. The game includes a built-in hint system, though using too many hints will affect your rank. (There are a number that don't work as intended, but the stuff that does deserves accolades.)
- The sound effects are good. There are satisfying "grabby" effects for stuff like vials of antidote. It has a good ba-doop survival horror "you got an item" sound cue. Some of the more cacophonous uses of crows cawing on the soundtrack in the later game are one of its few sources of tension. (I should also point out it has a good save room theme with an appropriate mix of momentary relief with uncertainty, and I'm appreciating the music more as I watch LPs after my own experience, but the use of sound effects is what grabbed me.)
- Finally, there's just a base level of quality to the game. Despite the very small dev team, there's no jank here. Everything feels and looks polished - it looks and moves like the dev(s) presumably envisioned it.
All right. Let's begin the airing of the grievances.
COMBAT:
There's an option to turn off combat entirely, and I would almost recommend it, as combat adds very little to this game. In survival horror, combat is usually crucial for the risk it entails and the tension it thereby adds to the environment. Now, survival horror combat is, by design or not, renowned for being clunky, and the devs - dev - has taken great pains to make the combat here easy and accessible, mainly by way of ammo. Ammo is extremely generous, regenerating in the environment, with dispensers (trash cans and soda machines) that are almost guaranteed to give you ammo if you're running low - and as a result, ammo is never a problem. On my second run through, I just smoked everything with very little regard for avoiding or dodging enemies; I experienced only a couple short intervals where I was hurting for ammo and had to go scrounge, and I was never, ever permanently stuck. That's a load off for those who hate survival horror combat, but it robs the game of one of the genre's big tension engines, and resource management is utterly out the window.
Furthermore, there are a number of changes to survival horror combat that are just for the worse. For one, the enemies can kill you really quickly. Like, BAMBAMdead, in under a second. I understand the desire to speed up combat, but it's one of those changes that illustrates why Resident Evil did what it did. You're not a damage sponge in horror titles, so when a zombie slowly leans in and laboriously takes a huge chunk out of Jill or Chris's neck, it's a huge arduous deal because it *is* a big deal: losing health is a significant event given your small pool, and the damage-dealing process is slow to allow your character to recover and the player to correct course. BAMBAMdead feels cheap and not fun.
That's a bigger problem paired with the targeting system: when you ready a weapon, the camera angle will yank around so that your character's back is directly facing the camera. This is meant to be helpful, but it's extremely disorienting - and with the relatively fast pace of the game and small rooms, the second's delay you need to readjust (since your character's line of sight is not always going to be laser-locked in a firing trajectory onto an enemy when you realize you need a weapon) was enough several times for the enemy to close in and land a cheap blow. You're also encouraged through notes to wait until enemies get right up to you to fire, since weapons will allegedly do more damage at short range. This did not happen in my experience, and the BAMBAMdead risk is far too great.
The enemies do have different behaviors, but not different enough (it's pretty much "fire as soon as you see them with the right weapon"), and with the ammo glut, you're not rewarded or penalized in a meaningful way for responding to them appropriately - outside of BAMBAMdead, which is no fun. All this amounts an experience that doesn't provide much in way of varied challenge, often feels frustrating and unfair, and doesn't add to the atmosphere of the game like it traditionally does in this genre. Combat didn't seem to have a point.
TENSION:
This issue takes much less space to describe than the previous item, but it's no less important. I've outlined above that the defanged combat takes a lot of tension out of the game. So does the environmental atmosphere: the N64 candy-colored kindergarten-block aesthetic, while rendered well, doesn't really lend itself to a horror mood. Horror relies on vibes and creeps, and there just aren't many here. It doesn't feel like there's any threat present. Particularly combined with the ridiculous plot, Crow Country comes off almost as a kids' horror game at points, and that might be the best way to take it. It's just not scary or tense.
ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN:
I'd like for a moment to defer to "Miamiwesker" from the ResetEra thread, as why should I talk we have commentary from Wesker and a Florida man:
Like Miamiwesker describes, I feel like the game's recursive unlocking is all messed up. You're presented with a heck of a lot more locked areas at once than in most titles, and most key items you'll discover will unlock multiple areas. The notes also mention all sorts of stuff at once, from immediate objectives to stuff that happens way, way down the road. This results in just too much info to juggle in your head at once. (Thankfully, in one of those quality-of-life improvements, the dev includes a notebook filled with the notes you've discovered so far at every save point so you can pause and sort things out, but you're still dealing with a flood of information.)
Now, in one of those quality-of-life features, the game does circle the location of the next major objective on the map - but you can't rely on that, as you might need to make a few stops along the way to get to that objective. So in your initial playthrough, the glut of options and Shit's Locked just makes you confused, overwhelmed, and lost, fostering tedious searches all over the map. I know the multiple unlocking options are meant to give you some choice and explorability, but I feel the genre's traditional more targeted approach is better.
Another change I didn't feel was an improvement was the addition of traps in "cleared" rooms as the game progressed. It's not like you'll encounter new design elements in new rooms, or that stuff that was previously deactivated in old rooms will activate as the plot and time progress to present an additional hazard; I mean, like, rooms through which you've traveled will suddenly have huge spiked chandeliers newly and inexplicably installed in the ceiling. New monsters, as our friend above noted, will also pop up in previously-cleared rooms, and not in a "Hunters have now reached the mansion" sense; it's just at random. Resources will also suddenly pop up in the environment when you're low. That's also user-friendly in a way - the environments are kept fresh and get tougher or provide resources somewhat depending on how well you're doing - but it indeed does make the theme park seem more "chaotic and random" and less like a place - like an environment you have to negotiate and manage. You can't really decide to clear problem or frequently-traveled rooms, and it's another way in which resource management is negated or left unrewarded.
STORY:
...Time to get into this. SPOILERS for this section, obviously.
OK, your character is allegedly a cop? But she's wearing a strapless poofy dress on her investigation and has her hair dyed purple? Which I initially chalked up to everything in the game looking like My First Shinra, so why should the protagonist look realistic.
However: at least one character comments on the disconnect between the character's alleged profession and how equipped she is for it in a slightly puzzled manner, in ways that could be chalked up to other factors (like, the woman who expresses reservations about why our heroine was sent and not the male agent to whom she spoke on the phone must just be sexist, right?) but which do communicate that mild '90s party wear is not police issue, and the pretense is so tenuous that even this voiced doubt shatters the illusion - like, how are we supposed to take this person as an on-duty officer of the law? (There are other not-so-subtle clues, like the heroine loudly commenting on not being able to smoke, drink coffee, or encounter adult magazines without saying "barf.")
All right, so it turns out that your character is not only a civilian instead of the highly-trained & lethal special agent she professes to be and the player is expected to believe her to be but is also seventeen years old, which - no. You could rules-lawyer that she introduces herself as police explicitly only to a couple cast members and that most everyone is either ill, injured, panicked, wise to her deal, or preoccupied with some other business, but the game and player base treat it like it's a big killer7-level mystery to figure out, and the pretense would fall apart in two seconds. Not only because of the poofy-dress thing, though also that. It's her age: even though the player can't tell how old the protag is because of her face's low poly count, the characters definitely could, and even with the "not everyone is told she's a cop" thing, it breaks credibility for any of them to accept in any capacity that this obvious child should be wandering the park alone, must less believe that she's an elite special agent.
Then we have the main plot, which involves...the villain discovering an infinite supply of gold. Like, it literally shlups out of holes in the ground in these clean, pure salami-like logs every ten seconds.
You know that giant cube that fits under the Eiffel Tower into which it's said all the gold in the world would fit? This system could make it in maybe a day. It's productive to the point that finding a place to house all this metal it serves up should be a legit problem after a week or two.
The big dilemma the evil corporation is facing in this game is not a plague of outbreaks from their illicit zombie virus but...like, their magic gold holes in Georgia are producing too much gold? They're afraid the U.S. government will come in and take their gold holes? So they decide to buy a gold mine in Brazil for a cover story re: from where the gold is coming? But then the Brazilian government, despite not seeing any of the actual gold-hole gold due to it being produced in Georgia, gets suspicious about the gold for some reason and wants to make sure it's from Brazil??? I don't know why they would object over too much gold, as they're surely getting taxes on the value, except if the Brazilian government is looking to confiscate any rogue magic gold holes out there. So the evil company makes fake gold ore - they have this machine where they crunch up the gold, then crunch up dirt, and then press it together to make something resembling Cookie Crisp - except the surrounding rock is identified as of a different composition from Brazilian gold mine rock, and--I'm sorry, I'm sorry; I can't go on with this. The plot ends with this corporate weasel who ended up being the fall guy for this scheme lamenting, oh, no, the Brazilian government froze all my assets, where am I gonna get more money, and he's delivering his tirade in front of a machine to which he has free access that spouts salamis of gold every ten seconds.
OK, look: I understand that in context, the gold is supposed to be a metaphor for oil, since the plot is meant as a climate-change metaphor and they're both resources we extract from the ground. But oil and gold differ greatly in value and scarcity, and some very elementary real-world considerations intrude here. If you think of the dilemmas someone with a secret, extremely prolific and never-ending supply of gold would face, none of them really lend themselves immediately to survival horror fare. This is not how gold works. "Infinite gold holes" is like a Preskool plot premise - but who uses Brazilian tax evasion as the premise for a kids' game? The whole thing is just inherently ridiculous and does not work on any level.
I will say that the origin of the monsters is interesting and novel for the genre, but it's revealed so late that the game can't do anything with it. I also think that the climate change theme is novel and suitable horror fodder, and it's expressed in the story in a few ways that are actually clever (like the narrative engine being the young protagonist going to confront the older capitalist and tell him that she's going to die as a result of his actions). It's just the gold plot used to get there that is complete clown shoes.
In thinking about this game's popularity, I'm reminded of the tales of how those who buy mobile ports of classic console games typically play them for only a little bit before putting them aside - the audience doesn't want actually to play those games all the way through; they just want to spend a few bucks to be reminded of what it was like to play them. I don't think Crow Country delivers the elements for which I'm looking in survival horror - atmosphere, tension from both aesthetics and gameplay, a good mysterious story - but it has enough of the trappings to placate those who just want to be reminded of what it's like to play survival horror. That it's short, easy, and relatively frictionless - not to mention on platforms that encourage longer-form play - enables more folks to make it to the end than, say, iOS Chrono Trigger. That it's an excellent recreation of an era that's underserved by the nostalgia machine helps greatly.
I'd like to close with some small touches that I appreciate.
- First (spoilers; highlight to read), no one is actually trying to kill anybody, except for the obviously-nervous jerk character. The heroine just wants to confront Crow the park owner and get him to acknowledge what he did to her. Crow's daughter Natalie, though she suspects the heroine might want to kill her father in revenge, doesn't try to stop her by tricking or hurting her; she understands why she feels as she does and, crucially, doesn't discount what's happened to the girl, but she tries to reason with her and appeal to sympathy - that her father isn't an inhuman monster and that she'd like the chance to talk to him about what he's done herself.
Even Crow himself isn't a Complete Global Saturation megalomaniac. He's actually secluded himself in his endgame basement lab to make an antidote for his accidental victim and anyone else who might be infected. He's given lifelike realistic hubris - he won't pay her medical bills because he knows the treatment won't work and therefore doesn't see the point. He created this dangerous situation due to negligence in his Unnatural Science, yes, but his Unnatural Science wasn't sought but rather foisted on him - something he discovered on his property and he studied because he thought it dangerous and there was something to learn to avert a larger threat (and he was right).
- I like that the save points are small little sources of light in the environment. Combined with the music, it provides a curious mix of hope and dread.
- The planned Future World section of the park is unconstructed. I thought this perhaps was impending DLC, but no: as this poster notes, it's a sign that (spoilers, highlight) the future ain't comin'.
- There's a crane machine game you can play to try to win a stuffed crow toy, but no matter how well you target your attempts, the crane will always release its grip on the prize, like actual crane games.
- The arcade also uses the game's 1990 setting to present a quiz game that near-entirely features then-current but now-updated trivia (Sears Tower as the tallest building in the world, nine planets in the solar system, etc.).
- There are some lines that are cute and charming.
There are some good, smart laughs, and they aren't too wink-wink as in many games trying to be funny nowadays.
- The crystal crow quest was a satisfying extra objective for New Game+. It's a smart leveraging of the game's detailed environmental design, it's tough but fair and logical, and the crows are often in funny places.
I like the reward for the quest, too. That was worth it.
- One of the bonus weapons is called the Crow Bar. Good job.
I have a coda here, but it includes (outright posted, not linked) shots of that reward, which I don't think is worth spoiling if you're going to play New Game+, and shows the final screen of the narrative - as well as who can potentially survive, and what can potentially be left of them! - so let me place the ENDGAME SPOILERS below a gratuitous Silent Hill 3 reference:
OK: In conclusion: 2024:
How did they cram five people into a Ford Fiesta?
